You have seen an advertisement in an Australian magazine for someone to live with a family for six months and look after their six-year-old child. Write a letter to the parents. In your letter: - explain why you would like the job - give details of why you would be a suitable person to employ - say how you would spend your free time while you are in Australia
Sample Response
Dear Sir or Madam, I am writing this letter in response to an advertisement published last weekadvertisement, published last week in one of the leading Australian family magazines, in which you askedwhere you asked for a short-termshort term live-in caregiver for your six-year-old child. I have relevant experienceproper experiences to take good care oftake the best care of your child, and I would like to apply for the positiontake the job. I am confident that I would be able to provide excellent care forrender a great service in taking care of your child since I have experiencehave had a good experience in raising a couple of younger siblings as the eldest child inof my family. Besides, I love children since I consider themconsider them as bundles of joya bundle of joy, and that is why I took care of some young children as a babysitter in my hometown. In fact, I find children so special that I have completedtaken a short online course on parenting so that I could understand children betterrelate to them in a better way. Regarding my availabilityBy the way, I recently came to visit Australia from my home country at the invitation of my uncle in order to live with him for the next six months or so. And, while I am in Australia, I would also love to explore this beautiful country and learn about the lifestyles and culture of its people in addition to taking care of your child should you choose to offer me the job. Yours faithfully, Daria Olga
Why this response received Band 7.0
The letter responds directly and persuasively, using relevant childcare experience, family responsibility and training to establish suitability while also addressing motivation and free-time plans. Its main limitation is a cluster of unnatural collocations and the single-block organisation, so the highest priority is to create separate paragraphs for motivation, qualifications and plans and use natural phrases such as relevant experience, provide excellent care and learn about Australian culture.
IELTS Writing Criteria Scores
Task Achievement
The response clearly expresses interest, gives several persuasive reasons for suitability, and explains relevant plans for free time in an appropriately formal application.
Make the motivation for this particular six-month role more specific by linking the job to the writer’s childcare interests and stay in Australia.
Coherence and Cohesion
Ideas progress logically from the application to experience, personal motivation and free-time plans, but the single paragraph and some casual connectors weaken organisation.
Divide the letter by the three requested points and replace By the way and sentence-initial And with more purposeful transitions.
Lexical Resource
The letter displays a good range of childcare and application vocabulary, but frequent awkward collocations reduce naturalness and precision.
Use relevant experience, provide excellent care, childcare training and learn about Australian culture instead of proper experiences, render a great service and lifestyles.
Grammatical Range and Accuracy
A wide range of complex sentences is used with generally clear control, although countability, tense and relative-clause errors recur.
Correct structures such as experience rather than experiences, an advertisement in which you asked, and I came to Australia to stay with my uncle.
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IELTS General Training Writing Task 1
You have seen an advertisement in an Australian magazine for someone to live with a family for six months and look after their six-year-old child. Write a letter to the parents. In your letter:
- explain why you would like the job
- give details of why you would be a suitable person to employ
- say how you would spend your free time while you are in Australia
Your response
Write the task yourself, then compare your choices with the annotated response.